The Busying Matters of Plans and Respect

I begin to stir in the morning, a busy day ahead of me. I do not want to be awake. Every part of me, mind, body, and soul, all yearn for sleep. “Good morning,” Jase says to me, disturbingly functional at eight in the morning. Begrudgingly, I have to admit I’m waking up. It takes some work, but I force my heavy eyelids open. Jase is walking back into the dorm room, a cup of coffee in each hand.

“Coffee?” I force out my not fully moving lips.

He takes a whiff out of one of them, nods, then hands the other to me. “This one’s yours,” he says. That makes me understand a little bit, at least. He must have had some kind of advisor meeting thing. Only time Ter lets him drink from her stash. I take up the cup and sniff it. It smells robust. I take a sip. It is a delicious blend, like the real good stuff. “Ter knew you were bringing me coffee,” I say. She had to have. And, frankly, it’s a little condescending. I need to talk to her about that when I thank her.

“I mean, Therese’s Therese, you know?” Jase very helpfully says. I understand what he means, though. He’s never doubted or questioned when Ter knows things, because Ter always knows everything.

“So, what has you up and giddy this early?”

Jase shrugs, smiles, and replies, “We had a meeting. And I’ve had more than one coffee.”

I chuckle at that one and slowly shift myself from lying down to seated on the bed. Jase looks at me, the slightest hint of impatience creeping onto his face. “What’s up?”

“It’s just, you’ve got class in like a half hour, so you need to get up, get dressed, and get going. Meanwhile I don’t have class until three and don’t have anything due in the next month, so I was just gonna knock myself out on your bed ‘til lunch time. Ish.”

I sigh with a smile. “You do remember that you have your own bed, in your own room, right?”

He smirks back. “Fair, but I’m already here, and it’s cold outside.” I chuckle, shaking my head at the doofus I’m dating, then I force myself to stand up. He swiftly rushes past and lets himself sit down on the bed. “You gonna be alright? With today, I mean?” he asks earnestly, his humorous look falling away in a moment.

I start to get dressed. And I lie to him. “Yeah, sure,” I say with a shrug, “I’ll be fine.” From the look on his face, I don’t think Jase believes me. That probably means he’ll show up tonight to check up on me, I muse. As he lays down, I take a moment to look at the small box in my closet. To center myself, before I start the day. Then, as soon as I’d finished putting on clothes, I slide out the door silently, letting the silly man sleep peacefully. And leaving everything else in there at rest as well.

I head early into Magister Locke’s class and sit down. He’s really phoning it in this semester, now that he’s finished everything but the year out. At least, he phones it in when he bothers to actually show up. He’s going to be a Maestro somewhere else come the summer and mentally, I’m fairly certain he’s halfway there already. I don’t know where he’s headed, nor do I particularly care. While he’s an okay advisor, he is not good enough to follow nor anywhere near good enough to worry about. Not yet, anyways. Nat shows up from one of her not-so-secret tutoring gigs. I nod at her, and she comes over. “You doing okay?” I ask her, to avoid the same or similar question being lobbied in my direction.

“Just overworking myself per usual. Is Jase doing alright? I saw him earlier and he seemed downright cheerful.”

“He’s crossfaded, class-and-assignment-less, and loving every moment of it,” I tell her the truth.

She chuckles. “He would be. You tell him about your summer plans yet?”

I shake my head. “Not really, no. He’s going to be really busy doing prep and the like for this government job he’s taking. I don’t want him to put off his future, you know?”

“So, you’re just going to ignore the problem until you have to ask people last minute again?”

“Shush,” I say with a smile, “I’ve got this. Besides, I didn’t hear you complaining about being asked to take a random, spur of the moment vacation for the rich and powerful last time.”

“True, but counterpoint: We’re not, nor have we ever been, dating. Also, the itinerary of that trip was less super romantic and more extremely up its own butt.

I lie. “Trust me, I have it all under control.” She believes me. I’m getting better at it. I don’t know whether I am worried about it. That alone probably warrants some concern.

It takes a half hour of our fifty minute class to simply show up. And the remaining time was mostly spent worrying about where we are in the textbook and whether or not the textbook is up to date. As I said, barely a class. If I didn’t need to take one of Magister Locke’s classes every semester, I probably wouldn’t waste my time with the class. Most of it we’ve already learned. In fact, I am pretty certain we learned about half of this stuff in the first weeks of his classes. And the rest is either logically cohesive with everything I know, or is stuff we learned in the back end of one of his classes.

Still, though, we’ll be tested on this nonsense at the end of the week. I turn to Nat. “Enjoy your day,” I say with a forced smile as together we head down the stairs in Konstantin and out the door. I take the Smoking Trail out to the strip mall, then take the alley behind the convenience store to the rear side of the central town. From there, I head down a set of stairs and into what, by all appearances, is an abattoir. I approach the gentleman cutting the meat and say, “Drift, what do you mean drift?” I half jokingly say, trying to exaggerate a southern accent and end up just sounding like I’m chewing on some kind of molasses. He leads me through the back to a private room.

“Your other guest has arrived.” The man gives a respectful nod to Ter. I note he did not give me the same respectful nod. Sitting across the table from Ter is Ike. They’re having a staring contest. Ike is losing. “So, is she, you know, when you meet up…” he trails off.

“I know this may come as a shock to you, Isaac, but I tend to avoid our mutual acquaintances sex life when we’re playing with the truths. There are some truths I don’t need to think about.”

“Three times eating here, and still no respect from the butcher,” I tell Ter as I sit down.

“That’s ‘cause you don’t do butchery. Show him how you can handle a chicken, he may change his tune,” Ter says, taking my joke and interpreting it as an honest cry for help.

“You two are both ready for the year, too, right?” I press.

“No,” Ter says. Her blank expression aside, she is most definitely joking. She’s got the next decade planned down to the letter. Honestly, that’s a big part of the reason I don’t care about Locke. While I don’t think about his future, Ter probably already has a plan in place to use him as, I don’t know, some kind of destabilizing force. Or a stabilizer. Locke seems like he could go either way, with his incredibly disagreeable but generally focused mindset.

Ike confirms my suspicions. “Don’t listen to her, she just wants to see you squirm. I got my topic picked out, a bunch of sources to start from, and a real interesting job that means I may not have to teach more than a class my first couple years as a Magister.”

Ter cocks her head. “Why would I wish that?” she asks me while she’s still staring down Ike. “Alina is much more capable when she is not out of it. Too uncomfortable, she’s not much help to us.”

I shake my head. This is one of the many reasons that I trust Ter. The others mostly being related to her ability to keep a secret forever, but this is different. Ter is just one of the few people willing to call anyone, and I do mean anyone, out on their crap. Once I saw her tell a Grand Maestro to his face that he was a force of stagnation who needed change to survive as badly as his region’s lower levels wanted it. That was this past summer. In the six months since then, that particular Grand Maestro ended up being forced to resign.

“Alright, I feel like I should give you some warning and focus on timing. You two absolutely need to be full fledged Maestros by the time I’m a great Maestro. Otherwise we’ll likely have some trouble.” It feels good to focus on the details. Makes me forget other things.

After a several hour argument about whether or not we should even work together once we’ve graduated from here, lunchtime is over. I pull Ter aside. “Listen,” I begin, “About this morning…”

“I know. It was slightly in poor taste. Jason wanted a good pretense for showing up after our meeting.”

“More than slightly. Also thank you, but still.”

“Jason has a plan, one that required him to take his nap this day in your room.”

I furrow my brow at the woman. “Any idea what it is?”

I know it’s my imagination playing tricks on me, but I swear to god she smirked when she replied with her simple, “Yes.”

Heading over to Dixon, I set to work on my projects for this week. The timing isn’t necessary, but, like the conversations, it makes it easier to not think about things I should be not thinking about. It’s a paper on the interpretation of ancient historyless or history-light cultures via their oral traditions of their specialized magics and alongside their archeological record. I find it somewhat fascinating, even when looking at the most boring of history-light cultures, but that’s just me. If I wasn’t on such an important path, I might have liked that sort of focus to my work. But I am on an important path, and I doubt those counting on me following this path would appreciate any extreme deviation from our mutual goals. Besides, I enjoy what I’m destined to do just as much. Politics becomes me, I muse, though the more I think about it, the worse that statement feels to think. Eventually, enough time has passed. Too much. Stay in the dark of the library too much longer and the librarians would kick me out on their own.

I head back across the quad to my dorm. Opening the door to my room, I see Jase, still chilling there. “Didn’t you have class?” I ask him as I walk in to put my work away.”

“It was canceled,” he replies.

“When?” I press.

He puts on his best innocent face. “Maybe like, um, yesterday.” He then quickly tacks on, “But you wouldn’t have let me stay, otherwise.”

“Clearly I have the right idea,” I mutter to myself.

“Let’s talk about this. I want to be there for you. Not just most of the year. Every damned day. Let me stay. Let me help. I’ll just be your silent rock, if that’s what you’d prefer. Or you can narrate the whole shebang. Just, I don’t know. Let me help you.”

I look at him. He’s being honest enough about his intentions. And I don’t know. Maybe it will even be nice to share the burden of the day with someone. I stand up, walk over to my closet, and pull out the small box. “Fine. I guess you can stay. But you stay respectful, okay. And to get what’s going on, to really understand, you have to know the whole truth about my brother Ric. And what happened to him.”